Posted
by
Roblimo
on Saturday February 26, 2011 @08:42AM
from the every-little-open-source-bit-helps dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has open sourced X-Video Bitstream Acceleration, their API by which they expose the Universal Video Decoder 2 GPU under Linux."
They may be a little late with this move, and not everything you could wish is now open source, but it's better than nothing.

The ATI drivers for Linux were never perfect, but they worked decently. But ATI/AMD would drop support for older chips that were still in use. The open source community never provided a shim to let these older drivers work with newer builds of X.

Does open sourcing the drivers really fix the compatibility problem? To me, not building a shim suggests a general lack of caring about ATI drivers. Do we really need the source to give a future to aging ATI/AMD chips?

And this is something that most people in the OSS world (has nothing to do with OSS in general, just OSS allows it to happen easier) utterly fail to grasp.

The bad thing with multiple APIs, that all do essentially the same thing is that they give 'choice'. I realize that most OSS users and indeed most techies LOVE choice, the rest of the world doesn't. Or rather, its not so much that they don't like choice, its that they are not educated about the choice enough to answer them effectively.

GTK vs Qt/Gnome vs KDE is a great example, here its not the users choice thats a problem its the developers. Some devs use KDE, some use GNOME, some use their own toolkit, some use X primitives directly. And combine that all together on a desktop and you get one big ugly fucking mess where everything works slightly different and the user just ends up frustrated because they don't spend their entire lives having a circle jerk to discuss which GUI toolkit should rule them all.

Multiple choices are NOT ALWAYS A GOOD THING, especially when you don't have the domain specific knowledge to make the choice, or someone else that knows nothing about you or your needs is making the choice for you.

The Linux desktop is example of why choice is not always a good thing.